9. Homework

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8. Thanks for Leaving  (18+) BLACKBIRD series, episode 1 #youlikeit - chapter 8 #2037897 by Prelooker

homework

Back to his hotel room, Brock took a long warm shower. He knew he hadn’t given it away at any moment, but that night had been a rollercoaster for him.

Being at a crime scene for the first time in almost six years, that alone was enough to get his blood pumping. And then interacting with Gillian. That woman was simply brilliant. The way she’d read the scene, how she picked up everything he said right away. He had almost forgotten how it felt, working with somebody so competent.

Now he needed to cool down, get it out of his system. Be ready to go back to what he really was nowadays: just a seasoned consulting agent, giving seminars all over the country on Profiling 101, to young field agents who couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the conference room—it was all such a waste of their precious time, damned geezer with his psychological bullshit about reading behavioral indicators to identify criminals, like they didn’t know how to catch a bad guy.

And there it was again, black and white. The condescending mask of fake attention he couldn’t get used to facing day after day. And the spark in Gillian’s eyes.

The way she didn’t hesitate to stand up for him when the beat cop questioned him—actually lying for him, and never asking the obvious question: what the hell are you doing here?

The simple fact that she was there alone, so late, going over and over what she knew and what she could see and picture. He had done nothing but show her the right track. Now it was up to her to dig and find at least a probable cause to bring three underage girls in, and get them to confess. But she would.

He wore his impeccable black pajamas and got into bed with his computer and his reading glasses, a bottle of water on his nightstand. Now he was curious about who she was. Lieutenant Gillian, Boston PD. The girl on the computer called her “Reg”, the G with the same sound as in “beg”. Why was a lieutenant working a simple murder, instead of a detective?

The search engine gave him so many matches that next time he checked his watch, he’d been reading for almost two hours, and he was about to get a degree on political quarrels inside the Boston PD. But at least now he knew about the polemic project Superintendent Gillian—Lieutenant Regan Gillian’s father, also known as King Gillian—had promoted after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, to form an elite group of agents in the Bureau of Investigative Services (BIS), which he commanded, to work mostly on terrorism prevention, and to assist any other Bureau or Division of the PD that might need it. The bill had finally passed and King Gillian got his Special Crimes Unit, led by none other than his own daughter.

She’d been a Homicide Detective for over ten years. She and her partner—one now Sergeant Robert Banks—had held the best rate of solved cases for the last six of the eight years they worked together. Then she was promoted to Sergeant Detective and transferred to a task force in the Bureau of Field Services, which worked mainly with gangs, in collaboration with the Youth Violence Strike Force. And six years later, she was promoted from Sergeant Detective to Lieutenant to take her new post as Unit Chief with the SCU, back in the BIS.

She had twice as many commendations and medals than the best police officers Brock had met in his twenty-five years in the field, and during the six months since it was installed, the SCU had successfully helped to solve some big cases related to homicides, drugs, missing persons, arsons, and even frustrated a school shooting before the shooter could actually grasp his weapon. They worked side by side with any division of the PD, the Fire Department and even federal agencies like the DEA. But there were many discussions about whether tax money should be spent on the SCU, and King Gillian’s political rivals argued he’d made it all just to secure his daughter’s future in the force.

Brock removed his glasses to rub his tired eyes. Politics, he thought. Plain to see they’d never seen her at work. This woman needed no-one’s help to “secure her career”.

He’d better get some sleep, or he’d be drowsing like his students in the morning. So he put aside glasses and computer, lay down, turned off the light. If the opportunity ever showed up, he should tell Cooper about her. The Bureau was always needing good assets, and this woman cut it.

He closed his eyes, scoffing at himself. Like Cooper would ever pay any attention to anything he might say. He was an outcast, when would he ever accept it? No senior officer would pay attention to anything he said, to keep themselves from being stained by his trampled-on reputation.

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10. The Tip of the Iceberg  (18+) BLACKBIRD series, episode 1 #youlikeit - chapter 10 #2037900 by Prelooker